EPIC delivered their "The State of Unreal" presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week (which had a great deal much time devoted to raytracing technologies). EPIC Games has been at the forefront of graphics development for some years now. Their engines (alongside a few other key players in the industry) routinely push the boundaries of graphical fidelity. And naturally, something would be amiss if they weren't jumping on the raytracing bandwagon as well with some of the most impressive proof of concept videos I've ever seen in real-time generated graphics. The company took their time, then, to unveil their artistic interpretations of real-time ray tracing, motion capture and real-time facial animation mapping. Cue many videos, after the break.
The first video is one readers of TechPowerUp may have already seen - it's a real-time, fully raytraced rendition of the Star Wars character Phasma. The shading and reflections are top notch - as is the elevator music, really (winks). This one video was done to showcase EPIC's partnership and usage of NVIDIA's RTX technology, and if you don't believe that can be rendered in real time, you should (it's really only a matter of how much processing power one can throw at any scene, isn't it?) Another video explains what is going on, and really focuses on the Depth of Field improvements this technology brings to the table.


Another proof of concept video that was brought to life to show the state of cutting edge 3D modeling and motion capture is the Siren video, which was developed by EPIC games in partnership with Tencent, Cubic Motion and 3Lateral. Motion capture is something we've seen brought to incredible levels of detail before already, though; just think of last year's Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, which really added it in an extremely impressive, detailed, and expressive fashion.


Here's a behind the scenes video of Siren, as well. Don't you just love that accent?


And finally, my personal favorite out of all of these. I have a special admiration for Andy Serkis' performance - he's truly the best motion capture actor of our days. When you look at the following video, a collaboration between 3Lateral and EPIC games and developed on the Unreal Engine, try and remember that this is only based on motion capture - you can actually recognize that quite clearly with the angle of the camera lens. If you ever wanted to see a rendition of Macbeth delivered by Andy Serkis while in the skin of an alien (and who hasn't?), well, you can thank me.


It's a braver new world out there, folks. Could you imagine, when you picked up your first Master System videogame, that this is where we'd be going to? Now consider this really isn't the best we can ever achieve. It's mind-boggling.